State of the Union

A new book on the First Marriage.

“In public, they smiled and waved,” Jodi Kantor writes, “but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House?”Credit Illustration by Barry Blitt

In “The West Wing,” employment at the White House was an invitation to a fizzy world of noble intent and screwball comedy. The spawn of William Powell and Myrna Loy aced their F.B.I. security clearances, did the world-altering work of civil seraphim, and strode endless hallways, cracking wise in pools of amber light. As it happens, to work at the White House is to wake each morning in darkness and in dread. It is not only the crises of global moment that shred the nerves. The constant tide of trivia cascading down the BlackBerry screen each morning, through Twitter and Politico, makes an aide’s first sip of coffee taste of acid reflux.

On September 16, 2010, Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s longtime press secretary, was greeted at first light with news that a book being published in France had Michelle Obama telling Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that she “can’t stand” life in the White House, that it was “hell.” Gibbs, a cantankerous Alabaman, went about strong-arming the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. The cost of failure would have been high. Like so much of the senior staff, Gibbs had, at best, a wary relationship with the First Lady. Most Americans admired Michelle Obama and were moved by her forthright intelligence and her determination to raise two normal daughters in the phantasmagorical aquarium of the White House, but the staff feared her. White House staffers always fear the First Lady. They fear, above all, her nighttime access, the pillow talk that can undo their careful planning. (Nancy Reagan was capable of persuading her Ronnie to fire a chief of staff or a Cabinet secretary with nary a glance across the TV trays.) Gibbs was immensely relieved, therefore, when he got the French to issue a denial by 11 A.M. Crisis averted.

And yet, as Jodi Kantor writes in her energetically reported “The Obamas” (Little, Brown), Valerie Jarrett came into the next day’s 7:30 A.M. staff meeting declaring darkly that the First Lady was in fact “dissatisfied” with the handling of Hellgate. Gibbs was baffled and enraged.

“Fuck this, that’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” he shouted. Months of anxiety about Michelle Obama and resentment of Jarrett’s curious role as senior adviser and First Friend came to a boil. “What is it she has concerns about? What did she say to you?”

Jarrett answered vaguely.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Gibbs said. “Did you ask her?”

Jarrett said something about the denial not being fast enough.

“Why is she talking to you about it? If she has a problem she should talk to me!”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Jarrett said.

“It was Jarrett’s tone, calm to the point of condescension, that finally undid Gibbs,” Kantor writes. He seemed so “frustrated one colleague thought he was going to cry.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said.

“The first lady would not believe you’re speaking this way,” Jarrett said, still composed.

“Then fuck her, too!” Gibbs said.

In the end, it appeared that Jarrett was using the ominous threat of the First Lady’s displeasure to cover her own ineffectuality in the affair. From then on, Gibbs and Jarrett barely spoke.

Kantor nails her story—she had six sources in the room—and casts it all in the stock lexicon of D.C. confrontations: Gibbs “shook with rage” and soon “stormed out.” The rest of the group “sat stunned.” The conflict, the profanity, the yelling: it’s the sort of vivid, if ultimately meaningless, detail that provides books like “Renegade,” “Game Change,” and, now, “The Obamas” with their lurid and irresistible zing. Such books regard more earnest matters like history, context, and ideas the way a child looks at a plate of Brussels sprouts. They aim to serve up big bowls of ice cream. And, no matter what Michelle Obama counsels, we political gluttons will lick the spoon clean.

In September, 2009, Kantor interviewed the Obamas in the Oval Office for the Times Magazine. During the 2008 campaign, she had written a series of revealing stories for the paper on Obama’s past. Now she asked the Obamas how it was possible to have an equal marriage when one partner was President. “The first lady let out a sharp ‘hmmmpfh,’ as if she were relieved someone had finally asked, then let her husband suffer through the answer,” Kantor recalls. “It took him three stop-and-start tries.” Kantor noted the “subtle tension I had felt in that room.” The couple had spent much of their marriage debating “how much change was possible within the political system and whether public life could be made livable.”

A book about the Obamas’ marriage, though, starts out with a problem. As the author of “Anna Karenina” could have attested, an unhappy marriage can be unhappy—and interesting—in countless ways. By contrast, when Ian McEwan tried to portray a happy marriage in his novel “Saturday”—“What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife”—not a few critics found it unbelievable or smug. “Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan’s fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex,” John Banville groused. Michelle Obama, in fact, has described her husband as “snorey and stinky” of a morning. More seriously, both Obamas concede that their marriage has known its tensions and discord, particularly a decade ago, when Barack was working as an obscure state legislator in Springfield, Illinois, while Michelle tried to juggle career, children, and household back in Hyde Park. She was not pleased and made sure he knew it, loading him up with shopping lists and resentment. The Obamas still have differences: he believes in political process; she is wary of politics; he is purpose-driven, ambitious; she wants everyone home for dinner at six-thirty, no excuses; she loses her patience; he apologizes. Yet the union, as far as we know, is solid and loving; it works. Their differences seem largely complementary. As the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa said of his beloved Adrian Pennino, “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.”

The outside narrative of the Obamas’ marriage takes Michelle to be the repository of domestic wisdom, decency, and integrity. She sets the limits and hoists, when needed, an ego-deflating eyebrow. Barack may possess outsized ambition and talent, but he leaves his socks and shirts all over the place and needs to be reminded that he is not, at least at home, the Prince of Peace. One suspects that the reality is more complicated, as in any marriage. (Who would have guessed that the lip-locked Gores, and not the tempestuous Clintons, would now be rent asunder?) Still, the task remains of making a happy marriage interesting—and of doing so without the imaginative equipment and freedoms of fiction. Kantor must content herself with what details she can glean from friends and associates, many of whom, we can readily tell, are sanctioned by the Office of Communications to fill the reporter’s cup with soothing Ovaltine. Kantor is wise to this, of course, but it doesn’t make her work any easier.

You sense the strain when, in the opening pages of “The Obamas,” Kantor sets out the terms of her project: “In public, they smiled and waved, but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House, and how was it affecting the rest of us?” Later, she works even harder to gin up the melodrama: “Could Barack Obama’s attempts to make his wife happy—to compensate for his decision to pursue politics, to run for president—hurt his work as president? What if his attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable—Michelle and politics, but also many other issues—were impossible; what if the attempts themselves came with their own costs?” The questions are at once labored and absurd. The state of a marriage is a poor guide to the course of a Presidency. The book is on surer ground when it sets aside all that and simply calls the Obamas on their occasional sanctimonies. When Michelle Obama tells a reporter that her husband is not really a politician but, rather, “a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change,” Kantor remarks that sometimes the Obamas are “like tailors who call themselves ‘garment reconstruction engineers,’ unwilling to fully acknowledge the business they were really in.”

The portrait that Kantor paints of the Obamas at home is an elaboration of her Times Magazine article and doesn’t much alter our previous impressions. The Obamas draw a pretty tight curtain around themselves. They eat dinner together in the residence at least five days a week. Michelle goes to bed at nine-thirty or ten, while the President does paperwork in the Treaty Room. They have a very small circle of friends. They do not go out of their way to seek out new people. (“The decision came with a price,” Kantor maintains, “reinforcing the already severe isolation of the presidency.”) The Obamas are “virtual prisoners” in the White House, something that rankles them both. The President tries to pierce the bubble by reading ten letters a day from ordinary people. Michelle shops online using a credit card registered to another name. When the Obamas wanted a swing set for their daughters, Sasha and Malia, the chief usher, Rear Admiral Stephen Rochon, visited the factory in South Dakota to inspect it. At Malia’s school, the fifth-grade band played once for the parents and siblings and once for Barack, Michelle, and Sasha. Michelle is the kind of helicopter parent that you might be if your helicopter was Marine One: she demands that Sasha and Malia finish their homework a day in advance when possible, and asks for written reports on their travels. She even persuaded the girls’ piano teacher in Chicago to relocate to Washington. When it comes to politics, Michelle presses the staff for clearly defined projects, no “one-offs,” but, in the end, won’t spend more than a couple of days a week on these projects. (Rahm Emanuel found her reluctance “maddening.”)

While Kantor seems, on the whole, quite admiring of the Obamas, she also cites their moments of self-pity—Obama has said that he can hardly wait to begin his life as an ex-President—which sit awkwardly with their tremendous good fortune. The Obamas (particularly Michelle) grew up in modest circumstances, but they come out of a collection of privileged institutions: Punahou School, Occidental, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard Law School; their daughters are healthy and bright, students at the Chicago Lab Schools and, now, Sidwell Friends. All the talk of lost privacy, the difficulty of living in the White House, the yearning for the normalcy of Hyde Park—we read it in “The Obamas” and have read it many times before—is understandable but also a little unseemly. The Presidency is not a career. Nor is it a component piece in a greater picture of familial contentment. It is an unimaginably demanding mission that inevitably exacts a toll. To carry it out, a President is going to miss some dinners, acquire wrinkles, gray hair, and worse. But we don’t want to hear complaints. We prefer our warriors happy.

The frustrations are, of course, hardly limited to life in the White House. Obama is President at a moment in history when the forces arrayed against him are preposterously difficult and malign; the conservative opposition is more radical than anything confronted by his predecessors. The public is angry and the crises—economic, diplomatic, environmental, social, and political—are myriad. For all that, staff members like Emanuel hated hearing the President railing against the “silliness” of Washington. “The rules apply to everybody,” as one former adviser told Kantor, and complaining about how Washington works “is like crying over the rain.” Obama was elected to lead “a rational, postracial, moderate country that is looking for sensible progress,” a White House official tells Kantor. “Except, oops, it’s an enraged, moralistic, harsh, desperate country. It’s a disconnect he can’t bridge.”

Have his intimates helped him try? Obama’s trusted circle is tiny, and this is why a discussion of Michelle’s role has more than gossip value. One encouraging theme that Kantor teases out in detail is Michelle’s insistence that her husband stay true to their common principles of inclusion and doing good for the most people. “While I get plenty of good advice from a lot of people during the course of the day,” Obama has said, “at the end of each day, it is Michelle—her moral voice, her moral center—that cuts through all the noise in Washington and reminds me of why I’m there in the first place.”

“The Obamas” makes a few glancing references to previous First Ladies and Presidential marriages, but a richer sense of history would have served it well. In “Hidden Power” (2001), a shrewd and entertaining survey of twentieth-century White House marriages, Kati Marton writes that the second-floor bedrooms and sitting rooms of the residence have known constant intrigue, intimacy, rage, and froideur. Take the marital history of the Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ellen Louise Axson, died a year into his first term. At a White House tea six months later, Wilson met a woman named Edith Bolling Galt, a plump and prosperous widow whose primary interests were travel and fashion. Teddy Roosevelt once said that Wilson had all the passion of an “apothecary clerk,” but reading Wilson’s letters to Galt you would take him for Lord Byron. Each day, he sent to her house, on Dupont Circle, a packet of billets-doux and state documents. After Wilson married Galt, in December of 1915, she began to sit in on high-level meetings. Four years later, Wilson suffered a “cerebral incident”—thus beginning Edith’s term as “the first female President of the United States.” At the time, Wilson was in a struggle with Congress to pass his design for a League of Nations—an initiative blocked by his nemesis, Henry Cabot Lodge. (“We shall make reservation after reservation, amend and amend, until there is nothing left.”) After a second stroke left Wilson paralyzed on his left side, unable to read or stand, Edith turned the White House into a kind of isolation ward. In the end, the Senate rejected the League, and Wilson was unable to run for a third term. He tried to write a book, but the only page he completed was the dedication: to his wife, Edith Galt Wilson.

What other White House marriages eclipse the Obamas’ for drama and misery? Nearly all of them, Marton’s book makes clear. After 1918, when Eleanor Roosevelt discovered F.D.R.’s affair with Lucy Mercer, their union, in the words of their son James, became “an armed truce.” For Eleanor, election to the White House “meant the end of any personal life of my own”—a note of self-pity that F.D.R. mocked with an irritated quatrain:

Did my Eleanor relate

All the sad and awful fate

Of the miserable lives

Lived by Washington wives?

Rather than bow to a life of disappointment, Eleanor emerged as an independent figure, and no less an iconic liberal than her husband. Encouraged by the Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, her loving confidante, she began to write a daily newspaper column, hold frequent press conferences, and speak out, at home and in public, for the poor, for the oppressed, and for the unlucky. She sent her husband so many imploring notes that F.D.R. imposed on her a three-memo-a-day limit.

First Ladies, like Presidents, have a way of reacting to their predecessor. Bess Truman’s reaction to Eleanor’s liberal Lady Bountiful was a kind of down-home reticence. (“A woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband and be silent and be sure her hat is on straight.”) Jacqueline Kennedy’s reaction to Mamie Eisenhower’s coupon-clipping homeyness was an insistence on cultural glamour. Both Kennedys, Marton writes, were “consummate performers”—thrilled by pomp and power and uninterested in inner life. “We’re a couple of icebergs, with most of who we are submerged beneath the surface,” Jacqueline said. There was a furtive cruelty to the marriage—one impossible to imagine in our era of hyperexposure. J.F.K. prevailed upon Jacqueline to hire as her press secretary one of his mistresses, Pam Turnure. At the White House, Jacqueline burnished her husband’s image, though she sometimes struggled with the strictures of government service. When she was told by the office of protocol that she had been given horses by both the King of Saudi Arabia and the President of Ireland but that, owing to their value, they had to be returned, she replied, “There’s a problem. I want the horses.”

Pat Nixon was surely one of the loneliest inhabitants of the White House. Richard Nixon was so flagrantly indifferent to his wife that one of his aides, Roger Ailes, wrote in a memorandum, “I think it is important for the President to show a little more concern for Mrs. Nixon as he moves through the crowd. At one point he walked off in a different direction. Mrs. Nixon wasn’t looking and had to run to catch up. From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her.” In Nashville, on her birthday, Nixon took the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and played “Happy Birthday” on the piano. The song complete, Pat ran to him with her arms outstretched in pleasure. Nixon spurned her embrace and signalled the master of ceremonies to resume the program.

Where Pat was the silent sufferer, Betty Ford was a plainspoken Midwestern emissary to the world of feminism and youth culture; she gaily admitted that she liked to sleep with her husband “as often as possible,” supported Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment, and allowed that she would not be surprised if her teen-age daughter had had sex or smoked marijuana. A couple of years after her husband left office, she was treated for a longtime dependency on alcohol and painkillers, and though her openness about her problem helped destigmatize addictions, it cast a sadder light on her years in the White House.

The most politically powerful of the modern First Ladies were Nancy Reagan, who controlled personnel and scheduling with the help of an astrologer, and Hillary Clinton, who, in the first year of the Clinton Administration, was given charge of the most comprehensive piece of proposed legislation in decades. Both suffered from their presumption, and both, in second terms, learned to recede and assume more discreet modes of influence. Laura Bush, coming in the choppy wake of Hillary Clinton, sought to avoid the relay circuits of power, and played the role of quiet booster. On her first trip to Kennebunkport, she was asked by her blue-blooded mother-in-law-to-be what she did. Laura replied, “I read, I smoke, and I admire.” She retained that back-seat discretion throughout the two terms of the Bush Presidency.

First Ladies are always careful to praise the glories of their office—the chance to make a mark on literacy, poverty, health, or, in Lady Bird Johnson’s case, “beautification”—and yet the sense of exposure can be unbearable. A life of intense publicity is typically one that the Presidential spouse assented to but did not seek out. For all her wariness about politics, though, Michelle Obama has clearly reconciled herself to her new role. As First Lady, she has her campaign against childhood obesity, and seems to play a pleasant admonitory role in a solid marriage. Like Abigail Adams, a proto-feminist, who urged her husband to “remember the ladies,” she has her principles and is quick to remind her husband of them.

In some respects, the Obamas resemble a post-sixties version of the Clintons. They are graduates of some of the richest institutions in the country. In Hyde Park, they lived among other highly educated, liberal, earnestly well-meaning, and self-regarding people, with all the requisite concerns about “family-career balance,” “doing good and doing well.” They lived with the small hypocrisies and pleasures of their milieu, bringing together some hyper-wealthy friends and unabashedly progressive causes. It is a liberal aesthetic raised to a style of life.

What makes the Obamas a departure, in historical terms, is race. In an excellent study, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency,” Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School (where he knew the Obamas as students), notes that in many black communities the celebrations surrounding the Obama election victory and the Inauguration were on a par with Joe Louis’s one-round knockout of Max Schmeling, in 1938, or, indeed, with the celebrations surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863. Among African-Americans, Obama was “adored for identifying as black when he could have labeled himself something other,” Kennedy writes, and “for being a paragon of dignity and intellectuality in a culture suffused with derogatory images of brutish black masculinity.” But Obama was also, signally, adored “for marrying a black woman, unlike many high-achieving African Americans who marry outside the race”—and, what’s more, a black woman who went to Harvard but returned home to the South Side. This circumstance was essential in capturing the black vote from Hillary Clinton, who had started out with tremendous support among African-Americans. Michelle Obama, in spite of her longtime reluctance, became a crucial asset in the campaign, and she has, despite lingering mistrust among many white conservatives, retained a remarkably high popularity.

For the Obamas, being the first African-Americans to reside in the White House has surely involved singular pressures. The greatest is security—we already know that there has been a larger number of death threats against the President than against his predecessors. But racial politics also play out in small, less ominous ways. When Vogue asked Michelle Obama to sit for a cover story, there was, Kantor reports, division in the ranks of the staff. Two white aides objected, saying that having the First Lady appear in Vogue, inevitably dressed in expensive designer clothing, would look unfeeling when so many people were living in misery. Two black advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Desiree Rogers, argued that, on the contrary, having an educated, attractive African-American First Lady on the cover of Vogue could be a source of inspiration, and counteract a plenitude of negative images. In the end, Obama posed for the magazine wearing clothes from both a young American designer she helped discover, Jason Wu, and J. Crew.

The cultural politics of race in America are always refracted through class. Kantor points out that when Michelle was an undergraduate at Princeton one of her aunts worked in town as a cleaning woman—a circumstance that she did not widely share with her classmates from Andover, Exeter, and Harvard-Westlake. Marian Robinson, Michelle’s mother, is the most endearing figure in the book; her lack of pretension has survived her relocation from a bungalow on the South Side to a third-floor bedroom in the White House residence. At the White House, the First Mother-in-Law insists on doing her own laundry, and, when she slips into D.C. on her own and someone stops her on the street to say she looks like the First Lady’s mother, she just smiles and says, “I get that a lot.”

The Obamas spend much of their social time with two African-American couples very much like themselves: Eric and Cheryl Whitaker and Martin Nesbitt and Anita Blanchard. Both Whitakers and Blanchard are physicians; Nesbitt is an entrepreneur, who made a fortune in the parking-lot business. They are all from the Hyde Park-Kenwood area on the South Side, and send their kids to the Lab School. They mix easily in the white world (Nesbitt’s principal investor was the Pritzker family) and give their time and money to community projects. Their friends also include John Rogers, a financier who played basketball with Michelle’s brother, Craig, at Princeton, and, of course, Valerie Jarrett—a kind of big-sister-confessor figure. They are all, by now, well practiced in talking to reporters about the Obamas. They praise the First Couple, and spice the interview with the occasional joke or semi-indiscretion to make the rosy picture credible. They talk about how African-Americans of their class and generation feel the weight of race most acutely in relation to affirmative action, sensing that whites often think they have not truly earned their place at Harvard or Princeton or on the medical faculty. But they soft-pedal such discomforts. Obama, too, has learned to speak in clichés and orotund deflection about what it’s like to be a black President, governing from a house built largely by slaves. As one of his close friends tells Kantor, “The first black president doesn’t want to give any insight into being the first black president.”

When the Obamas finally leave the White House, they will undoubtedly write memoirs, which might add to what we know of their relationship on Pennsylvania Avenue. It would be too much to expect indiscretion, though. Harry Truman, late in life, caught his wife, Bess, burning their letters to each other. “What are you doing?” Truman implored. “Think of history.”

“Oh, I have,” she said, and went on adding to the pyre. ♦

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.